Globally, compliance and regulatory requirements may force companies to preserve and provide electronic information such as e-mail messages, documents, and other similar electronic information. Failure to provide such information may result in financial and/or legal exposure for the companies. In order to satisfy organizational, compliance or legal rules, legal and/or compliance officers within the companies may often rely on discovery searches to retrieve relevant content. Key to retrieval of the relevant content is the ability to identify participants who may have been involved in any pertinent communications in a timely, comprehensive, and accurate manner. Ease of use is important too, as the legal and/or compliance officers are not expected to be technical or product experts.
While current communication management applications (CMAs) may offer an ability to identify direct recipients in communications, such as individual recipients via TO, carbon copy (CC), and/or blind carbon copy (BCC) fields, the CMAs do not offer an ability to identify non-direct recipients, such as one or more recipients within a distribution list (DL). As a result, companies may often rely on journaling with third-party archiving solutions to store and index the communications, so that they may be later retrieved for discovery searches. The third-party archiving solutions may include an external, single-instance storage system that stores journal-based reports for every communication. In addition to the content of the communication itself, the reports may also contain all the intended recipients, both direct and indirect, on the communication.